In England (and indeed the rest of the United Kingdom) it *is* strictly tied to titles. We still have a functioning peerage, although new lordships are now generally life peers (their children still get to call themselves 'The Honorable' though, I think). Always seems odd when people refer to how part of our goverment works as a historical thing :-D
My French history is a little rusty, but I thought I had read that where in the UK we have both nobility and gentry (with the gentry being the land-owning class without titles from which promotions are made) in France they used 'nobility' for everything - hence the problem of lots and lots of nobles?
ISTR once I went to an Oxford historian's lecture about noble families in the fourteenth century that suggested that on average they only lasted about 3 generations from founding to extinction, because being a noble was so dangerous, so people were being brought up from the gentry all the time to fill the holes. I think the argument was that people think of social mobility as a Renaissance thing, but if you keep chopping heads off and having bloody wars at the top, then you kind of have to have some social mobility all through or you just run out of people.
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My French history is a little rusty, but I thought I had read that where in the UK we have both nobility and gentry (with the gentry being the land-owning class without titles from which promotions are made) in France they used 'nobility' for everything - hence the problem of lots and lots of nobles?
ISTR once I went to an Oxford historian's lecture about noble families in the fourteenth century that suggested that on average they only lasted about 3 generations from founding to extinction, because being a noble was so dangerous, so people were being brought up from the gentry all the time to fill the holes. I think the argument was that people think of social mobility as a Renaissance thing, but if you keep chopping heads off and having bloody wars at the top, then you kind of have to have some social mobility all through or you just run out of people.